Google account suspended: A post mortem | Hacker News Reader

Google account suspended: A post mortem

justinlilly.com

55 pointstwampss23 comments

Over reliance on third party free services is a real danger.

What's realy scary about this example is that there is no certainty about why the account was suspended, and also that the people trying to email him would be notified of this. At a minimum he should have still had read access to his account and an email from google in his inbox as to why his account status was changed.

A good warning to everyone else!

Over reliance on third party free services is a real danger.

This seems to imply that if he were paying money for his Google account he would have either been safe or gotten prompt customer service if it suddenly stopped working.

That has, sadly, not been my recent experience.

Well, at least he would have had a right to it. With free services you can expect to get what you paid for, with a paid service I think the bar is a little higher.

If google maps stopped working tomorrow and your business depended on it I really wonder who you would look to to complain.

Email is of course a different matter and I think they handle account disabling in a very silly way at google. But it's still much better than at PayPal for instance (and technically speaking you do pay for PayPal).

well, technically speaking you do pay for Google as well, just not in the traditional way of handing money in return for something, but the more ancient way of handing something in return for something.

There is a paid version of Google Maps, costs $10k/year. It is required if you develop a private application (ie. not open for everybody).

My account was once temporarily suspended. Reason was probably because I used to have 2 different gmail id one for personal and one for office adwords, adsense, analytics, webmaster etc.

Had a very similar experience of realizing how much we rely on google. I couldn't check my emails, could not IM anyone except for the ones on old ICQ account. Have no access to a report I was creating on google spreadsheets and fear of having lost all photographs on picasa, my reader list, calendar and more.

Google is already a pseudo-desktop/OS on the web. And if that crashes its as worse as a MS blue screen.

Open Office is gratis, and USB sticks are cheap.

When you really think about it if you are a single user you do not actually need google docs.

Does anybody know what happens to your Android phone when Google suspends your account? I know my G1 required a google login to actually complete the boot process the first time, but after that I've never used any google services other than maps. Would my phone notice if my account were suspended?

I believe you can just reset your phone and make a new account to get it working again. I suppose you might lose contacts, calendar entries, chat logs, mail, and/or applications.

This is largely why I switched my email to a paid provider that I trust plus local backups; it's simply too important.

Which is not to say that Google doesn't offer excellent services or that people shouldn't use them, but I think many people put far too much trust in a single provider without planning for things going wrong. Stories like this make me slightly apprehensive about all the buzz surrounding Google Wave.

i have two google accounts and one is a mirror of the other (each account POP3s the other account). i also share all google docs with the other account. calendar is also shared with each account with full access. other stuff i can live without.

It sounds like you still have a single point of failure in there somewhere.

Yep, availability of Google services, but he completely solved the account problem. This is a very nice solution, altough I fear having to share everyhing could get labourious.

isn't that usually the case in any system?

Hmz, reminds me I've been to lazy about making e-mail back-ups. Starting one right now.

I use Google as a search engine, that's it. I really don't like all-in-one solutions (except Emacs but I can put that on a USB stick) and am actually surprised how much the person in the article trusts to Google.

I also suffered the same, in my case I got suspended two times. First time, I could recover my account (2 or 3 days later), but then, I had to wait for about 5 months... and it's such an horrible thing ... (and makes you think about google and it's situation, or how almost everybody uses at least one google product).

By the way: I currently run my own email server, but I couldn't resist myself, so I have a little weird configuration. My email servers stores a copy of every mail received, then sends it back to my Google Apps account (that can be done easily with a few tweaks). At least I can enjoy Google talk and the Gmail interface, without the fear of losing everything if I get suspended one more time (I hope not).

I run my mail locally and use gmail as the backup.. hopefully losing a Google account and a disk failure wouldn't happen at the same time.

Seems to me this is an argument for applications run on a local machine rather than software-as-a-service (SaaS). At some point you could get dependent on some SaaS provider who could take your data and services away for some reason with which you don't agree and with no reasonable recourse.

This was the most disturbing and telling piece of the whole story:

"There was no mention from Google as to why my account was suspended"

Unreal.

So, he never said why his account was suspended.

His most recent comment says that he believes a typo in his fetchmail script meant it was looking for new mail every minute instead of every five minutes, and he thinks that's why he was suspended.

Every minute? I'd be surprised if Google even noticed.

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